History That Isn't

With Stalin
being friendly, Zinoviev on leave and the Politburo hedging their bets, Trotsky
has to be careful. It’s October 1923 and the scheming, rivalry and machinations
to take over from the dying Lenin are at their height. Trotsky is favourite;
although he has his enemies, Zinoviev among them. Trotsky’s mistake is to go
duck shooting. Having got his feet
wet while wearing felt boots, he catches a cold, develops a temperature and
spends the rest of the Autumn and Winter ill in bed. Thus, he misses essential
meetings, fails to foil plots and begins to lose his influence. As he said
later, ‘One can foresee a revolution or a war, but it is impossible to foresee
the consequences of an autumn shooting-trip for wild
ducks.’ Would anyone write the novel where Trotsky
decides to forego the day’s wildfowling, calls Stalin’s bluff when he calls
Trotsky the best man for the job, out schemes Zinoviev and Soviet Russia is an
entirely different beast? Possibly, but it sounds like
literary fiction to me. Much counter-factual genre
fiction concentrates on exact turning points. Lee wins the battle of
Gettysburg. Britain surrenders to Nazi Germany following the blitz. The Duke of
Medina Sidonia’s Armada is victorious. (As Phillip II of Spain said, after the
winds drove his war fleet onto the rocks, ‘I sent it to fight the English, not
God…) More interesting are those novels that look at
the alternate worlds such turning points create. And they succeed or not, for
me at least, on how skilfully the turning point is chosen and how plausible the
writer makes the world created. So, why don’t I
worship Zoroaster? If the Persians had won at
Thermopylae in 480BC, sunk the fleet of the City States at Salamis, and not
been defeated at Plataea, I wouldn’t be writing this in English with Winchester
cathedral behind me. And the date for Thermopylae wouldn’t have BC after
it. The Hellenistic world was John the Baptist to the
Roman Empire. Without Constantine and the empire, Christianity would be a
footnote in early Zoroastrian studies. I write in English, with its Latin
borrowings, using a Western mindset, and drawing on Judeo-Christian ideas
because: Although the Persians won at Thermopylae, they lost the
cultural war. (And 130 years later, Alexander of Macaedon rubbed salt in the
wounds by conquering their empire and spreading Greek culture from modern day
Turkey to India.) Greek culture influenced Roman
culture. Roman culture embraced Christianity. Rome’s
empire having spread itself across Europe, ensured Christianity did the same;
along with Roman law, Romano-Greek myth and Latin as Europe’s universal
language for several centuries. Never mind being responsible for Disney
cartoons about Hercules, that Latinised remnant of a Greek borrowing from a
Middle Eastern Neolithic shamanistic culture. Why this
fascination with alternate worlds? What makes writers and reader, and some
academics, obsessed with realities that literally run counter to
fact? For me, it’s a chance to look at this world, by
looking at where we are, as opposed to where we are not, or where we could have
been. The interest is not the turning point, but what it births afterwards,
sometimes centuries afterwards. We take a hypothetical branching point, were
futures are close enough to have a recognisable common ancestor, and consign
our reality to the line of historical extinction. History
is how we find ourselves where we are. All our millions of individual histories
go to make up that greater history. It’s peopled by ghosts and contains what
we’ve learnt, not learnt and simply forgotten. At its
worst, written history is what cultures want to have happened, not what did. Rashamon,
on a vast scale. The difference is always between what the victors claim and
what the losers say, with the latter often being lost. What really happened is
often hard to know to an absolute degree. If only because the records on which
we rely are coloured by the original scribe’s subjectivity, the demands of
propaganda, and the scribe’s own political sensitivity and sense of
self-preservation. And that’s before the culturally-constructed sensitivities
of the modern historian kicks in.